With each passing day, Zifa is churning out a fresh circus and this cannot be allowed to continue unchecked. The suspensions, counter-suspensions and hearings sagas have reduced the football mother body into the worst caricature one can think of and this demands urgent solutions.
Cuthbert Dube, once a darling of the local media, has had a nightmare at the helm of Zifa and the sooner he steps down, the better for the sport and for the little integrity he has left.
But calling for Dube to step down is quite a simplistic and piecemeal solution that will not solve the quagmire that local football finds itself in.
What Zifa needs now is a more holistic investigation that seeks to get to the root of all the problems football finds itself in and this goes beyond and might be bigger than Dube himself.
Dube may have been a victim of circumstances, he tried to cleanse the sport of past corruption and yet he has a log in his eye and this could be the genesis of the country’s football problems.
Getting rid of Dube is the easy part, but the whole football fraternity needs an urgent overhaul and playing the blame game is not helpful.
For instance, the whole Asiagate match-fixing saga has seemingly been swept under the carpet and the culprits have gone scot-free without any brought to book.
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It is astonishing that local football clubs masqueraded as the national team and yet, then, no one batted an eyelid.
Who can forget the El Savador debacle, where Zimbabwe played a bogus team, easily the equivalent of sporting treason, and yet no one was convicted for this?
As Zimbabweans, we have been culpable for the mess at Zifa and it is time we demanded accountability from leaders, both past and present.
As they say, a new broom sweeps cleaner, we expect the new Sport minister, Makhosini Hlongwane, to hit the ground running and bring order to Zifa.
There has been a dangerous sentiment that the government should dissolve the Zifa board and deal with Fifa sanctions later.
We advise the new minister that such a gung-ho approach would not only be disastrous, but lacks vision.
Such short-term approaches to problems the country faces are not only unconstructive, they are also the reason the country finds itself in this economic and social quagmire.
With the fast-track land reform programme and the indigenisation law, government claimed it wanted to right past wrongs, but it did not look at the long-term ramifications, which have seen the country sinking into an economic black hole.
Hence we advise a more measured approach.
If Hlongwane is genuinely interested in finding solutions to the problems at Zifa, he must investigate legacy issues and not airbrush the historical difficulties that have become a trademark of the football mother body.
What is needed to clean Zifa is a sober mind devoid of the emotional prejudice that has surrounded media coverage of local football and the association that governs it.
In the interests of progress, we also advise Dube that stepping down will do him no harm; he is already a villain in the court of public opinion and the longer he holds onto the post the more he becomes unpopular.
